Austin ThomasEssay 1, Prompt 1
Magic and Metamorphosis: Prospero’s Change in The Tempest
As Shakespeare’s last completely self-written work, The Tempest occupies a
unique place in the Bard’s corpus. And like other last words, it offers a certain
poignant glimpse into its speaker’s “life”—the career of a solo playwright—and into
his craft. So it is especially interesting that he should choose to give such a
prominent role to magic—prominent, but also problematic. Magician protagonist
Prospero shows just enough goodness and just enough oppressiveness to keep
readers unsure of his true nature, and the methods he and his fairy servant Ariel
use are often morally ambiguous. Furthermore, the play concludes with the
audience’s being asked to decide whether Prospero has undergone the change he
purports. He all but claims metamorphosis, and indeed, Shakespeare’s reuse of
Medea’s speech from Book VII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is necessary to give
meaning to Prospero’s use and renunciation of magic.
Texture would hardly be lacking even without paraphrasing Ovid. Magic in
the early modern period was a bifurcated business, with white magic that was
“nothing else but the highest realization of natural philosophy” and black magic
that consisted “wholly in the operations and powers of demons” (Pico par. 34), to
borrow the words of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In The Tempest, Prospero implies
that difference between him and Sycorax is an example of this white-black split
(1.2.272-287). Unfortunately, it is a poorly delineated distinction. We hear that
Sycorax was banished “for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible / To enter
human hearing” (1.2.267-268), but none of these sorceries are enumerated. It
seems her magic differed from Prospero’s, however, because although Ariel “[was]
a spirit too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands” (1.2.275-276), he
obeys Prospero in everything.
To complicate matters, Prospero seems not to perform much magic himself.
Ariel, who
becomes fire (1.2.213), invisible (3.2.41), a harpy (3.3.56), and Ceres (4.1.88-150),
is also able to control a storm (1.2.228), make men drowsy (2.1.164-180), cause
them to follow him (4.1.169-172), and conjure up glittering clothes (4.1.185), In
fact, Ariel does most of the magic in the play, and Prospero’s main ability seems to
be able to persuade Ariel and other spirits to do his bidding, although he says that
he rifted a tree (presumably with lightning [1.2.277-280]), and we see him flying
while invisible (3.3.24). Readers are later told that Prospero’s charm “strongly
works” (5.1.17) his prisoners Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian, and Antonio, but it is
never revealed how he did charm them. Because of how little magic Prospero
actually performs, contemporary theatregoers may have found it difficult to
determine whether he was a good magician or evil. Indeed, since Ariel’s magic
seems very much demon-influenced, and it is not obvious whether Ariel actually
exists or is simply a figment of Prospero’s dispossessed-ruler imagination, it might
have remained forever unclear whether Prospero was benevolent or malevolent. But
the magician’s Metamorphoses monologue at the beginning of the fifth act resolves
the issue nicely.
“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves” (5.1.34), Prospero
begins, and the events he proceeds to describe seem at first incongruous. They can,
with some effort, be bent to the play’s action: Prospero purports to have enlisted
the help of various spirits in order to perform magic. He “called forth the mutinous
winds…to the dread rattling thunder / Have I given fire” (5.1.43-46). These are the
things that Ariel claimed earlier to have done—perhaps, we hope, he is just a player
in Prospero’s head! Then Prospero says that he “rifted Jove’s stout oak / With his
own bolt…and by the spurs plucked up / The pine and cedar” (5.1.46-49). Ariel
needed to be removed from a pine tree, so if Prospero did these things, it is more
likely that Ariel exists.
Prospero’s final claim, that “graves at [his] command / Have waked their
sleepers, oped,
and let ‘em forth” (5.1.49-50), returns the speech to incongruity. This is almost
certainly evil magic, and if Prospero actually did raised the dead, he would seem to
be quite evil—on the order of Sycorax, and possibly too evil for Ariel to take his
orders. Better to look at the speech from the speech in terms of its likenesses and
differences with Medea’s in the Metamorphoses.
Considering it in this way allows a middle ground between merely good magic
and merely bad magic. The speech draws heavily from thirteen lines in Latin as
translated into English by Arthur Golding, and it is possible that Shakespeare
included it more on the basis of his having learned it in grammar school than on any
special meaning he wanted to convey. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s earlier
plays are “lavishly decked out with Ovidian mythological references in [a] sweet
witty style,” and his later plays contain more nuanced interpretations of the
Metamorphoses.1 It seems likely that Shakespeare was at least familiar with the
story behind Medea’s monologue, and so had a certain agenda in writing so much of
it into Prospero’s words. It seems equally likely that Shakespeare neither intended
to center the whole play around Prospero’s abdication speech nor intended the
speech to center around the whole of the Metamorphoses, or even their Book VII.
But certain similarities and contrasts are simple and obvious: that the speeches
conclude differently, that their speakers are at very different points in their stories’
action when they orate, and that the speakers share some fundamental similarity or
difference that made Shakespeare want to compare them in the first place.
Shakespeare’s choice to interrupt Prospero’s speech is only apparent in
comparison with Medea’s. In Shakespeare’s Ovid, the difference is not apparent2,
but a recent translation by A.S. Kline3 shows that only about half of Medea’s speech
is used as the basis for Prospero’s, which diverges shortly after he claims to be able
to raise the dead. The speeches’ different conclusions give an impression of
fundamentally similar characters taking divergent paths, an idea bolstered by the
differences in the speeches’ locations. Medea’s monologue comes as she prepares
to do magic more noteworthy than any she has done before, whereas Prospero’s is
delivered in preparation to renounce magic. Again, Shakespeare’s desire to
compare Prospero to Medea indicates that he saw some common or distinct quality
in their situations that merited attention. This trait, it seems to me, is a difference:
Prospero, for all his artifice, is ultimately accountable to both the audience and to
himself; Medea is accountable to no one.
Consider Prospero’s most immediate reaction to Ariel’s telling him that he
ought to feel sorry for the crazed prisoners (5.1.18-19)—he promises to give up his
magic (including, presumably, command of magical spirits). From there, he
produces music to soothe the prisoners as they return to the stage. In the epilogue,
he admits a vulnerability to the audience, as he “must be here confined by you / Or
sent to Naples” (5.Ep.4-5). And whether because of Shakespeare’s intentionally self-
conscious playwriting or a desire to create a genuinely metamorphosed character,
1 A. B. Taylor, ed. Shakespeare’s Ovid. 212-213. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.2 Ibid., 156-1573 Kline, A.S. Metamorphoses (Kline) 7, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center. 28 Sep. 2012 <http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph7.htm>.
Prospero confesses that he has planned to please the audience (5.Ep.12). Medea,
meanwhile, remains unrepentant to the end: after killing the king who usurped her
lover Jason’s father, she flees to Athens and marries—only to try to kill her
husband’s son! In all of this, too, she is never punished. It is possible (if improbable)
that Shakespeare meant this to be a reversal of his inspiration’s title, for it seems
that Prospero has undergone real metamorphosis and Medea continues to, well,
prosper.
Shakespeare appears to succeed where his model Ovid failed, reworking a
protagonist’s key speech to realize change where none had been before—a fine
way, certainly, to spend his last words.
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